All posts by RogerG117

This is a challenging time for everyone and I hope you are well. Many community conferences cancelled or moved to an online event. The online events give the oppurtunity to learn and discuss in an different way. The European Sharepoint Conference (ESPC) Team has announced the Azure Week between 25.05. – 29.05.20 as a webinar week.

The Azure Week has an great lineup with very useful sessions. Thomas Maurer open the week with a session about Modern Azure Cloud operations for IT Ops and I have the pleasure to close the week with a session about Azure Policy with Azure Security Center.

In this session we will dive into the many aspects of Azure Policy and Azure Security Center and see how they work together.

Time has changed, and the actual situation around the globe has shifted many personally events to virtual events. Global Azure (formerly known as Global Azure Bootcamp) has also transformed the personally meetings around the globe into purely virtual events. This has prompted many community organizers to make their events virtual. The Global Azure Team decided to make an own global virtual event around the globe with a dedicated call for speakers. This has led to the beautiful result that now several global azure events are taking place simultaneously. Some are organized by local organizers and one event is organized by the Global Azure Team. This results in three Azure days of Azure sessions (Thursday to Saturday) around the globe with an awesome agenda, where you can pick the sessions that suit you perfectly 🙂

In the past I have taken several Azure exams, and yesterday I took the Azure Security exam Az-500. I am really glad that I passed the exam. In this article I will give you a brief overview of the topics I saw in the exam and what materials I used to prepare for the exam. I can say directly that the best way to succeed in the exam is practice.

General

Both exams are released as beta exam. This means that the first 300 people who book the exam and take it by 31.05.2020 at latest will receive a discount of 80% of the exam price. This reduces the price from 165€ to 39,27€. Book the exam over the Microsoft MCP Portal or directly over the exam site and use the discount code at the payment process. When the limit capacity of 300 codes are reached, you get a notice.

Short notice: The Microsoft learning blog has announced a new Azure exam, the Azure Administrator Az-104. This is the successor of the Az-103 exam. The exam is available right now as a limited beta. This means that the first 300 people who book the exam and take it by 31.05.2020 at the latest will receive a discount of 80% of the actual exam price. This reduces the price from 165€ to 39,27€. The needed skills are listed on the official exam site.

The beta exam is a pre-release of the exam and you can help to improve the exam. So take an eye on illogical or incomplete questions or graphics and note this within the exam to the team. This helps the team to improve the exam and the following participants to get a better exam experience.

The article is currently being revised and in the next two weeks some improvements will be integrated.

In the past I had a lot of talks about Azure File Sync, a lightwight solutions to sync servers from different locations and branches via Azure Files. One often questions was, it is possible to use Azure Files directly with the integrated Active Directory authentication – The great answer since a few days is Yes, this is possible.

Now you can use Azure Files with On-Prem Active Directory authentication as a fully replacement for Fileservers. No need for Azure Active Directory Domain Services (Azure AD ADDS) or different settings on Azure Files. This gives great new ways to using Azure Files for Fileshares and to use Azure Files directly for WVD and coming closer to a cloud native solution or to a fully replacement for On-Prem Fileserver.

In this article I will explain how to configure AD authentication for Azure Files and list information about region availability some basic steps and more. Please feel free to use the comment section or Twitter to get in touch with me and gives me feedback about the article and the solution.

In the past I do a lot of Azure Governance workshops. One part of this workshops are the high availabilty options in Azure. This article descripe the different SLAs for VM workloads in Azure. Often I get an ask about the SLA level and the requirements. In this discussion many people are confused about the difference of Availability Set and Availability Zone and how this compares to the SLA. The new feature about the Proximitiy Placement Groups comes into play to make the confusing complete. This article descripes the differences between these features.

One of the great things about IT is that you learn something new every day, discuss new solutions or possibilities with other people and have a wide range of options. And there are many conferences throughout the year that you can use to expand your network and learn from other people how to implement and use the various services. I enjoy attending conferences, discussing solutions with the participants, learning from the participants and sharing my knowledge about the services.

In the first half of 2020 there are so many conferences right now announced. I think this is a good point to share a list of all upcoming conferences. This is a list of conferences from all about Europe that I know about. Some are free, some of this need a small fee to cover all the related thinks, like catering, drinks and so one. Take a look of the upcoming conferences and identify some in an area near you, register and grow your network.

I think it was a great time with Windows Server 2008. WS2008 launched Hyper-V, one of the most powerful hypervisor on the market and the foundation of today’s Azure infrastructure. With WS2008, the first version of the Server Manager, the pre-release version of Windows Admin Center, was released.

In this article, I will list some of your options to get extended support for available Windows Server 2008 (R2) – but I prefer to discuss new solutions to replace the outdated infrastructure. Use this date to consider a change to move your infrastructure to the same flexible and scalable environment you had when Windows Server 2008 was introduced.

I know the time is to short to demote the existing Windows Server 2008 R2 and migrate the workloads to a newer operating system. But now it’s time to modernize your landscape. See which solutions Microsoft offer to extend the time or to renew the infrastructure.

Azure Bastion is a new service to reaches Azure VMs in a secure way without needing a Jump host in the same VNET or to publish an Public IP for a VM.

Azure Bastion is in public preview since end of June 2019. Now the service is General Available (since Microsoft Ignite 2019) and many limitations are gone. This article will short introduce the service, the new features and how easy is it to enroll the service in the environment to reach Azure VMs (Windows or Linux) over a secure way.

The #AzureWeek webinar week starts today. Each day a hourly webinar about different #Azure topics with a great lineup. Take a look at the agenda and my session on friday 👇
https://www.reimling.eu/2020/05/speaking-at-the-espc-azureweek-about-azure-policy-with-azure-security-center/